Kathleen Parker, one of my favorite GOP columnists at the Washington Post, wrote a cautionary column last Sunday asking fellow Republicans to be more careful in picking their allies. She was of course referring to the enthusiastic backing of rancher Cliven Bundy, who refused to pay grazing fees for his cattle on federal land and threatened Bureau of Land Management agents with armed resistance. At first, delighted tea partiers and their conservative fellow travelers in Congress, state governor's mansions, and on a major TV network rallied around Bundy.

But it didn't take long for Fox's Sean Hannity, Senator Rand Paul, and Governor Rick Perry to walk back their support when Bundy claimed that blacks were better off under slavery.

Although Parker handled it with a light touch, making fun of the trio of embarrassed Republicans and tried to make it seem like flawed logic for liberals to conclude that the Republican Party was racist. No, she bravely soldiered on. This was a failure to vet Bundy properly, and she made the call that her party needed to do a better job of choosing their friends. That's all. Merely a zany and embarrassing misunderstanding.

It was a nice try from an embarrassed and decent but loyal Republican. But as the ever perceptive Dana Milbank argued in another column on the editorial page, Republicans, while probably not all racist, should not have been at all surprised by Bundy's racism. He pointed out the long history that the anti-government, anti-tax fringe movement has had with racism. He correctly cited their roots in the 1970s Posse Comitatus Movement and the 1990s Montana Freemen Movement, among others. He also pointed out that Perry, especially, has "flirted with secessionists" in Texas.

A friend of mine posted four words on her FB page shortly after the Zimmerman verdict Saturday night, "Sad I'm not stunned."

I have two children, a 39 year-old daughter and a 16 year-young son whom I have talked to about the Zimmerman case several times. We've talked about why the police let Zimmerman go without a thorough investigation in the first place; about why there had to be pressure initiated by the community for police to do their jobs; about why this young man, Trayvon Benjamin Martin, was treated differently than my son would have been; why justice for my son would have been different.

My son amazes me with his maturity one moment, and bewilders me with his immaturity the next. Odd for a child this age? Of course not, it is absolutely normal for him, passing from man-child to manhood is a slow, methodical, frustrating process. Young men at this age make coherent, sometimes brilliant decisions one moment, and mind-boggling less than prudent decisions the next.